from Gary D
"Zappaz, I think the guidelines are out there in the collective consensus more or less amorphously, even if not explicitly stated. From my background I tend to approach things from the standpoint of legal evidence rules, and whether or not this material if it were offered as evidence could be shown to a jury. Hence I refer to those "indicia of reliability." We can see the difference between the Dettmers allegations, which I support for inclusion, versus the notion of PR knowing of Jagdeo's activities, which I don't. With Dettmers we have someone whose organizational title gives plausibility to his having had personal access and knowledge, and who tells a fairly detailed story of specific events, for example a drunk and abusive PR offending a particular woman on a particular occasion. I didn't include that here because it's not particularly informative, but it means Dettmers is daring to put out specific items that he knows are subject to being specifically tested and disputed, by counter-testimony, corroborative documentation, discrepancies in the details he gives (similar to an alibi), whatever. He says, "I was there and this is what I saw." Now, the guy may be lying through his teeth, but we can't say he's assembling conclusions from other people's info without a basis in his own personal experience. With the Jagdeo thing, by contrast, there just is no one and nothing that pins down PR to knowing about it. That's the kind of inference we keep out. Even in Dettmers' stuff, I left out his characterizations—PR is a coward, PR is abusive, there is a climate of fear around him—because those are of no help to us; instead, we can read the specific events Dettmer claims to have witnessed and decide for ourselves. I did put in one characterization, about PR being not cynical but instead believing himself beyond restrictions, because that characterization goes against the more obvious one of hypocrisy being drawn by other ex-premies, and so the very fact of it coming from our witness is somewhat informative. So, to (finally!) answer your question, if an ex-premie gives a testimony on usenet tomorrow, before including it we would ask, Is it specific? Is it testable? Does it come from his personal observations, and not someone else's hearsay? Do the testimony's or the person's situation make it plausible that he might be telling the truth? Is it corroborated? This is what limits the concern over either side just dribbling new material into the article forever—it has to meet those criteria, and I suspect we're just about to the end of the material that does and that is not obviously minutiae. The PR fact situation is not a blank slate that can be added to indefinitely at will. --Gary D 23:13, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)We'll see, I suppose."